Specifically, I was writing about toilet paper for students in the New Orleans public schools, who were getting ready to start the new year.

John McCusker / The Times-PicayuneGreater Gentilly High School, run by the Recovery School District, opened in January. It is one of the first New Orleans public schools built since 2003.

It’s a little hard to wrap your head around the topic now, given the events of the following week and the five years since. But back in mid-August, 2005, Katrina was just another name on the National Hurricane Center’s yearly list, and school bathrooms were actually the subject of public interest.

In fact, by then school bathrooms were a perennial problem. Some years earlier this newspaper had documented deplorable conditions at several campuses — no stall doors, graffiti, the stink of urine, toilets clogged with sanitary supplies and toilet paper rolls — and published a telling anecdote about how students at Abramson High would head out to Taco Bell between classes to take care of business.

So it was no surprise that, when a School Board consultant promised a roomful of teachers in 2005 that schools would be fully stocked with toilet paper for the first day of class, they greeted the announcement with skepticism and retorts along the lines of “I’d like to see that.”

So would I, I remember thinking. Basic restroom maintenance seemed such a small problem, with such an easy solution. And yet it had come to feel like an insurmountable obstacle, and an apt symbol of the paralyzing dysfunction that had overtaken the school system known as much for its crumbling buildings as for its inept management.

I thought about that column not long ago while driving through Gentilly, giving a former colleague who’d moved away before the storm a tour of the damaged areas. We’d just passed through a particularly forlorn stretch when we found ourselves on Paris Avenue, where I pulled over in front of the gleaming new Greater Gentilly High School, which boasts 21st century technology, green architecture, and — I’m presuming — functional facilities.

This is a public school in New Orleans, I said. Can you believe it? Even as we eyed the brick-and-mortar evidence, neither of us quite could.

Now comes long-awaited word that more modern, functional schools are coming — $1.8 billion worth, the lump sum that FEMA awarded Wednesday to compensate for the 127 schools damaged or destroyed by the hurricane and subsequent flood, after years of lobbying by local officials. The money will go toward building or renovating 87 campuses across the city, in accordance with the Recovery School District and Orleans Parish School Board’s master plan.

The good news arrived from Washington in the midst of a fifth anniversary media onslaught that has celebrated progress since the storm, but also has also exposed raw nerves.

Yet as difficult as it is to relive the terrible events of 2005 and the long struggle since, it’s also hard to think about the time before, when a major urban school system couldn’t do the bare minimum — and couldn’t blame its shortcomings on any monster storm or catastrophic engineering failure.

And it wasn’t just the schools that were in deplorable condition before, and will emerge from the Katrina experience in much better shape.

As we found out the hard way, the pre-K levee system was woefully inadequate. Katrina spawned a massive, nearly complete public works project to provide 100-year flood protection, including gates at the city’s outflow canals and a two-mile-long, 26-foot high wall in Lake Borgne, east of the city.

Problems at the New Orleans Police Department that date back well before Katrina have been exposed by the federal criminal investigations into police conduct after the storm. In addition to the prosecutions, the Justice Department has partnered with the Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s administration to remake NOPD’s troubled culture.

And of course, along with new buildings, the schools have been remade academically, a development prompted by the pre-Katrina School Board’s measurable failures to teach, but made possible only by the post-storm turmoil. It’s not perfect, but it’s hard to argue it’s not an improvement.

It will be better still once all students get to spend their days in clean, sanitary, welcoming environments where, hopefully, they’ll never again have to worry about their basic needs.

Stephanie Grace is a staff writer. She can be reached at sgrace@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3383.